Living Image / Feeling Dead: Hito Steyerl in Hito Steyerl

Photography in the Expanded Field (Balkon)

Introduction

Wide-ranging dimensions are covered in this volume of Parkett not only geographically but also anthropologically. The contributions move with astonishing ease between macro and micro dimensions and between the extremes of the hyper-digital and the archaic-analog. In this respect, they revisit the kind of universalism, all but forgotten in recent decades, that has a frequently anthropological approach. In the work of Andrea Büttner, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Camille Henrot, and Hito Steyerl, we find not only variations on the narrative of creation but also exemplary reviews of everyday culture in a hearty and densely interrelated mélange of people, animals, objects, plants, and minerals.

What begins on our cover as a striking kaleidoscope of feline and human eyes—it is a filmstill from Camille Henrot’s LA GROSSE FATIGUE (2013)—is followed inside the magazine by images that are all the more wondrous for their appearance of normality. In her audaciously frivolous project of illustrating Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Andrea Büttner deliberately provokes a clash between image and text, for that philosophical monument is, in fact, intrinsically “visual.” The polarization of the social classes and their specific “experience of objects” is Abraham Cruzvillegas’ point of departure for his installations while the object in Hito Steyerl’s work is the artist herself: vanishing point of an abandoned subject as the consequence of an economically globalized HD reality. Also in this issue an insert by Kilian Rüthemann.